News Intel announces the Arc B580 and Arc B570 GPUs priced at $249 and $219 — Battlemage brings much-needed competition to the budget graphics card market

[rluker5]

RDNA4 will be the new Polaris. Battlemage is the last gasp. I would check out a B380/B310 for SFF though.

I'd wait for reviews on that. The hype expectations for RDNA2,3 turned out to be drastically unrealistic. PS5 pro doesn't seem to be doing much better than the PS5 as well. That and AMD's long history of charging as much as they can get away with since Polaris also gives me doubts. That and their PS5 pro upscaling has issues.

But you could be right. I'm just skeptical.

 

[palladin9479]

It doesn't have to beat the 4060 by much, only be cheap enough to be an option. The 200~300 segment really needs some love.

 

[tommo1982]

My experience with Arc over the past couple of years is that drivers have improved quite a bit, but it's mostly for stuff that doesn't get actively benchmarked by people like me. I haven't tested a DX9 or DX10 game in close to a decade I would say. But having support for older games is important, and the good news is that with the DX9 wrapper Intel created over a year ago, most of the compatibility problems were addressed AFAIK.

I am equally sure there are still plenty of edge cases — "But game [x] doesn't run properly on Arc!" I think one of the games someone mentioned to me was an older Mass Effect, which worked at one point and then stopped working with newer drivers? But broadly speaking, if you're not routinely dabbling in more esoteric games (meaning, smaller indie games, or stuff from years ago that you just felt like playing), Arc GPUs are fine.

The transistor density and power efficiency are still odd, though. They're far lower than competing GPUs. I don't know if Intel is using automated layout algorithms that just aren't tuned as well, or if there's something else at play. But when you look at "10% faster than RTX 4060" and tack on "while using 50% more power" it shows there's still a lot of room for improvement. We'll see how it goes once I get drivers and run a bunch of benchmarks.

That part about older and indie games is what bothered me. I guess I'll go with RX7700, I do play a lot older and indie games.

 

[thestryker]

That part about older and indie games is what bothered me. I guess I'll go with RX7700, I do play a lot older and indie games.

It's hard to say how much of a problem this really is going to be, but it is a question mark. Most of the older games should work okay as they rewrote how the drivers handle DX9/11, but will likely be slower than AMD/NV. For the most part things written on DX12/Vulcan should be fine, and they've improved some of how the drivers handle Vulcan (this should be backwards compatible). Some issues they've had are also related to the graphics architecture itself (for example Horizon Forbidden West was problematic on Alchemist, but looking at the Intel provided results looks much better on Battlemage).

Here's the somewhat recent look Tim from HUB did on the A770 (some of the problems here with older titles was that they were hard coded to bypass Intel branded GPUs to avoid the IGP which is a terrible way to resolve that):
Written: https://www.techspot.com/review/2865-intel-arc-gpu-experience/
Video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y09iNxx5nFE

 

[tommo1982]

It's hard to say how much of a problem this really is going to be, but it is a question mark. Most of the older games should work okay as they rewrote how the drivers handle DX9/11, but will likely be slower than AMD/NV. For the most part things written on DX12/Vulcan should be fine, and they've improved some of how the drivers handle Vulcan (this should be backwards compatible). Some issues they've had are also related to the graphics architecture itself (for example Horizon Forbidden West was problematic on Alchemist, but looking at the Intel provided results looks much better on Battlemage).

Here's the somewhat recent look Tim from HUB did on the A770 (some of the problems here with older titles was that they were hard coded to bypass Intel branded GPUs to avoid the IGP which is a terrible way to resolve that):
Written: https://www.techspot.com/review/2865-intel-arc-gpu-experience/
Video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y09iNxx5nFE

I switched to Linux to play games recently, so the state of the deiver will matter even more. I'll wait for RX8800 release and see the prices then.

 

[palladin9479]

I switched to Linux to play games recently, so the state of the deiver will matter even more. I'll wait for RX8800 release and see the prices then.

So if your playing on Linux then you might be familiar with DXVK. It pretty much solves backwards compatibility for most every title I've come across. If it's a really old title, like DX8 or previous, then you use a DX8 to 9 or DX8 to 11 proxy then use DXVK.

 

[User of Computers]

lol they're already out of stock on Newegg

 

[shady28]

My experience with Arc over the past couple of years is that drivers have improved quite a bit, but it's mostly for stuff that doesn't get actively benchmarked by people like me. I haven't tested a DX9 or DX10 game in close to a decade I would say. But having support for older games is important, and the good news is that with the DX9 wrapper Intel created over a year ago, most of the compatibility problems were addressed AFAIK.

I am equally sure there are still plenty of edge cases — "But game [x] doesn't run properly on Arc!" I think one of the games someone mentioned to me was an older Mass Effect, which worked at one point and then stopped working with newer drivers? But broadly speaking, if you're not routinely dabbling in more esoteric games (meaning, smaller indie games, or stuff from years ago that you just felt like playing), Arc GPUs are fine.

The transistor density and power efficiency are still odd, though. They're far lower than competing GPUs. I don't know if Intel is using automated layout algorithms that just aren't tuned as well, or if there's something else at play. But when you look at "10% faster than RTX 4060" and tack on "while using 50% more power" it shows there's still a lot of room for improvement. We'll see how it goes once I get drivers and run a bunch of benchmarks.

Agree with the overall sentiment on older games, but it should be noted that older games don't exactly run flawlessly on AMD/Nv. The triple-a titles usually do yes, but anything less is hit or miss. Just look at the steam forums on games like Dragon Age:Origins or worse, one of the old Quake games. Big difference is likely going to be a larger community of gamers to help get it to work properly with NV/AMD. Any older game that is not actively maintained is a potential problem regardless of what GPU you have.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

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Question - What GPUs do you want to see compared with the Arc B580?

So, I've totally overhauled both my test PC and my test suite for the coming year, and that means I need to retest every GPU in every game/application for the upcoming Intel Arc A580 review. And... I've run out of time. I will have, for sure, the following: Intel Arc B580 Intel Arc A770 16GB...

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